Photographic Memory
by graphitewarrior
Summary: Reeve sees Vincent's past through pictures - and shows him a picture from his past too. Reeve/Vincent, pre-relationship. One-shot.


"How did you find these?" Reeve asked, staring at the photos Vincent had spread out on the table before him.

"Some I already had. Others I found last week when I was visiting my old apartment."

"Your old place stayed intact all that time? Even through Meteor?"

"I lived in old Midgar. When Shinra had just started out, before plates and sectors. When they actually cared about durable construction."

Reeve grimaced, but he knew Vincent was right—the plates and sectors were in shambles, and Midgar's very first apartments from the sixties that Reeve had deemed shoddy (and ugly) as a young architect stood intact, as if to mock him. "And they didn't clean it out?"

Vincent shook his head briefly. "No. I guess 'death of the occupant' wasn't a good enough reason."

Casual as always. It never seemed to bother Vincent that he was a reanimated corpse. "But it's been so long. Not even one break-in?"

"Nothing was different."

"Wow." Reeve couldn't imagine having the kind of gap in his life that Vincent had. Thirty years was most of his life—most of Vincent's, too, and the latter had spent it asleep in a deathlike trance. Though Vincent's appearance betrayed his "real" age, he was past his youth, somehow; all these pictures of him as a teen and twentysomething confirmed that.

Reeve turned his attention to the photos and picked up a small black-and-white photo. A bespectacled teenager with short black hair, clearly Vincent—long nose, high cheekbones, thin frame. He wore a fitted jersey with the number 81 and cutoff jean shorts, and he held a tennis racket across his chest. In a nearby photo he turned at the hips to return a serve, the racket clutched firmly in his hands. His straight hair swished with the motion, and the shorts rode up his blindingly white thighs. The photos had not been taken on a court, which led him to believe that the cutoffs were not part of the uniform. Reeve picked up another photo. Vincent kneeling to the ground, his knees pointed toward the camera, with his tennis racket touching the ground in between his feet. It was even more noticeable there how short the cutoffs were. Turning the photo over, Reeve read "1967 season."

"I remember my mom taking those pictures," Vincent said over Reeve's shoulder.

Reeve flinched, his face flushing slightly. "You played tennis in high school?"

"Yeah."

Reeve stared at the cutoffs, tight against Vincent's thighs. His legs were so long and thin. Reeve looked up at Vincent, then down at his legs. He felt an intense urge to rest his palm against the inside of Vincent's thigh, but it passed. Vincent had diverted his attention toward the window, looking at something outside, and didn't notice.

—

Turning his eyes toward the pictures again, Reeve picked up another one.

Vincent in a navy leisure suit, his hair freshly cut, his red eyes small and beady inside his overwhelmingly huge glasses, which were swallowing his face. His expression was stern and neutral, the kind of expression he was known for now. With both hands he held a card, and the photo stopped at his waist. Because the top corner of the card had reflected the flash, Reeve had to squint to decipher "II" after "VINCENT G. VALENTINE." His height, 6'0, and weight, 135 lbs, were written below. He flipped over the photo and read, "September 4, 1973 – First day on the job." Turning it back over, he looked more closely and noticed the dark circles—always present on Vincent's face now—already apparent underneath his eyes. Reeve handed the photo to Vincent. He glanced at it, nodded, and gave it back to Reeve.

"So you're Vincent Valentine, the second?"

"My dad went by Grimoire after I was born. It's our middle name, and it was his nickname before then."

"Oh, I see." Reeve looked at Vincent, meeting his eyes. Now having seen him with glasses, he realized how much larger, how much more intense his eyes looked without them. "When did you stop wearing your glasses?"

"I see better without them now."

 _That didn't answer my question_ , Reeve thought but didn't say, seeing a slight change in Vincent's expression. It had to do with her. It always had to do with her.

"So she didn't like them," Reeve said, covering his mouth with his free hand and speaking under his breath, not with any tinge of malice and not intending to be heard by Vincent.

"It's none of your business," Vincent said, at a normal volume, somewhat indignantly.

Reeve's stomach lurched. He diverted his eyes to the left, down to the floor.

—

Trying to forget, and hopefully also diffuse, the tension he had just caused, Reeve picked up another small black-and-white photo of Vincent from his youth. Vincent, standing in front of a floor-length mirror, wearing a thin-strapped tank top and a tailored pair of jeans. He held a camera, and he had taken off his glasses. His pose was what surprised Reeve—one hand on the camera, the other over his shoulder with a leather jacket in hand, the opposite hip popped out. He looked out from under his eyelashes and smirked, showing a few teeth. He had slicked his bangs back and he wore what looked like boots. Reeve flipped the photo over and read "Vincent Jr. –May 1967." Penciled faintly underneath in different handwriting was "Looks like his dad!" He handed it to Vincent, grinning.

"The things you do when you're sixteen," Vincent explained. He turned over the photo, squinted, and turned it back over, but his expression remained neutral. He gave it back to Reeve.

"The pose is what gets me," Reeve said. Vincent closed his eyes and covered his mouth with his claw. He was probably laughing or smiling and didn't want to show it; he'd done it before around Reeve. "You thought you were pretty hot back then," Reeve teased.

Vincent took his claw away from his mouth, straight-faced again. "I was just messing around. Trying to be cool or something."

Reeve was reminded of a photo from his own youth. It was one of the few he had managed to save in the aftermath of Meteorfall, one of the few still remaining in the ruins of his parents' home, and one he'd been overjoyed to see. Vincent was lucky his apartment hadn't changed, not because of Shinra, not even when Meteor struck. Through his tears Reeve had been left to gather up everything not contaminated by the Geostigma his mother had contracted, washing his hands ten times with blistering hot water when he got home, getting brief reprieve whenever he lifted up his upper arm to wipe his nose.

Vincent was past his youth in a way, yet simultaneously still imprisoned in it. Reeve—he was _really_ past his youth. He was older, now, but lived every year as it came, growing further from the photo he was now determined to show Vincent.

—

Because it had been his mother's favorite photo of him, he'd seen it far too many times to count; even without having rescued it, he would have been able to picture and describe every detail. He pulled it out of his wallet and flattened the crumpled edge. Vincent leaned down to look at it.

He was younger and his face and body were thinner, though he clearly weighed more than Vincent ever had. His thick, dark brown hair, crowned by cheap plastic sunglasses, was so curly it appeared to be permed; a stray curl hung in front of the corner of his eye. The jean vest was open, and his chest and stomach, covered with a smattering of brown hair, were lighter than the rest of his tanned skin. His light blue tie-dyed swim trunks and pale bare feet in slide sandals a size too small completed the awkward-early-nineties-teenager look. He was hunched over a bit, laughing—his mother had always said his eyes glowed in this photo—and in his right hand he carried a portable cassette player, twisted headphones dangling from it. Vincent turned it over and Reeve felt a mix of embarrassment and sadness knowing that his mother had written "Our precious darling at 17 – July 1990" on the back.

"Has your hair always been so curly?" Vincent said.

"Well, I had just gone swimming, and I was going back out to lie out in the sun. So yes, it does look much curlier than usual." He'd heard the photo's backstory so many times that he sounded like his mother, telling it yet again, this time to someone who didn't know it. Someone who hadn't known him when he was young, when clumps of lost hair clogging the drain were rare, when his forehead had been free of stress lines.

Vincent held the edge of the photo with his fingers, staring at Reeve in the photo, then looking over at him. Reeve smiled at him and Vincent turned away. Vincent said "hm," straightened his back, and went to put the photo in his pocket before he remembered. He stuttered briefly and placed it back on the table in front of Reeve. "Sorry. Wasn't thinking."

Reeve smirked, more triumphantly than anything. Vincent always made him blush offhand, but it was the first he could remember that he had seen Vincent's cheeks redden a little.

—

It was kind of funny. Looking through all the pictures, and everything Reeve brought out the next day, they saw each other's parents and Reeve's late sister, who died in a car accident at thirteen, plenty of times. There were pictures of Reeve at Shinra and Vincent at Shinra, some with coworkers, and Reeve knew he had a photo with the members of SOLDIER but hadn't been able to find it. Reeve had no pictures of his ex-partner—lots of photos from his twenties were missing anyway—and didn't mention his existence to Vincent, but he was curious to see no pictures of her among what Vincent had. Surely he'd had at least one.

At the same time, he knew what it was like. He could picture his ex in full, living detail, his smile and laugh, as much as he was sure that Vincent still heard and saw Lucrecia. It had only been twelve years since Reeve's breakup, but it didn't feel fresh. Vincent's loss had happened over thirty years ago, but he still carried the hurt with him. It still felt fresh, because Vincent was still in his 27-year-old's mind as much as he was in his 27-year-old's body.

With Vincent, the only way to find anything out was to ask or to wait until he decided to reveal something. Reeve wouldn't wait in this case. The curiosity was killing him.

"Didn't you save any pictures of her?"

Vincent froze. Then he replied, calmly, "Who?"

"You know who I mean."

Vincent stared at the table for a moment. Then he reached in his pocket, the very same he had tried to stuff Reeve's teenage portrait into, and pulled out a picture, slightly rumpled at the corners. "Here," he said, reaching over the table.

Reeve frowned for a moment. Then he smiled. "Don't be funny with me," he said. "I didn't mean Marlene, and you know I didn't." He handed her school portrait back to Vincent. "Come on, show me. I've never seen her before."

Vincent reached into the pocket again and pulled out another picture, this one bent in the middle. He passed the photo on to Reeve.

Vincent was in this photo, too, and somebody else must have taken it. He stood, hands plastered to his sides, smiling without showing teeth, his head tilted down a little bit, without his glasses. Reeve suspected he was right that she hadn't liked Vincent to wear them. She was only a few inches shorter than Vincent—Sephiroth must have gotten his height from her—and almost as thin as Vincent was. She wore a blouse and a skirt, and her straight brown hair, parted in the middle, fell below her waist. Her facial features were small, and even though she was tall, she looked petite. She had her hands at her sides too, though less rigidly, and she smiled without showing teeth as well. The slight bump of her stomach was somewhat obscured by the crease in the middle of the photo, but Reeve could still tell from her legs and feet that she was a few months pregnant in the photo. He turned the photo over. "1977. Dr. Crescent and I – Nibelheim."

Reeve looked up. Vincent looked away, clutching his arm with his claw. His eyes and expression were empty. Feeling a rush of boldness and sympathy at the same time, Reeve said, a little more loudly than he intended, "She made the wrong choice, turning down someone so handsome."

"I don't need your flattery," Vincent grumbled, closing his eyes. But Reeve had made him blush for the second time in one day, and he felt the triumph again, at the same time that an ashamed voice in his head whispered that he was being cruel and selfish.

"I'm sorry," Reeve said. "I really don't know what I was thinking by saying that."

A tense silence passed. Vincent opened his eyes, then crossed his legs, still facing the wall. "I'm just not used to hearing it."

Reeve couldn't think of anything to say. He placed the picture in the center of the table and got up to get a glass of water. He heard Vincent push his chair in. Turning around, he watched Vincent walk to the door and turn the knob, and before he had the courage to say anything, Vincent was gone.


End file.
